Writing a PhD.

Writing a PhD feels like being locked in darkness, in a cage above a sea of worries and dreams. All the stories that you’ve dreamt of writing, all the articles, all the reviews, all the people who should have had the same interest as you …. they all got swallowed by this tiny word: “PhD”. It is only you and the tons of books to be read, and the torments of writing something “original”, and the exhaustion of juggling with one or two jobs, your students, and the writing process. 

Writing a PhD. means Sisyphean work, loneliness, no communication (at least not in this country), a new level of tiredness, giving up a lot of things, desperately trying to find (more) time for writing, and when you finally find a few moments, ideas don’t want to be written on the blank page, and you ask yourself dozens of doubtful questions every day: “why do I do it? Why do I write about a country which is not mine? Why do I spend my free time by doing this? What do I gain from it?”

I think that at the end there will be a sort of freedom, of being able to figure out what to do next, a kind of freedom that I can achieve now, by giving it up, or then, after other months of work …. But freedom, no matter its shape and colour, always means responsibility. We can pretend otherwise, run away from it, make thousands of decisions to prove ourselves how free we are, but one day or another we will realise that we are no longer teenagers (if we’ve ever been that) who can run away from it.

I know that at the end there will still be dark, and there will be no people around, and there will be no professional gain, but if I give it up right now, there will always be present that stone, that regret, for all the years that I gave to it, for all the hopes, for all the ideas and the things that I read, and wanted to write, for that part of me which I try to put on a blank piece of paper. It is the closure that I owe to that part of my own self. Writing a PhD. is like Sisyphus’s carrying that huge stone on the top of the mountain, although he/I know that tomorrow nothing of all of these will have mattered, and that we will have to start over.